The Top 5

Tony Hsieh wants to hack your email. Not literally, of course. The chief executive of online retailer Zappos.com, Inc. has figured out a clever way to help busy employees avoid what he calls the “never-ending treadmill” of daily messages.

Well, I’m not say­ing that I have lived this per­son­ally, but when I was run­ning sup­port at Tum­blr I would go to con­fer­ences for sup­port peo­ple and the way that Au­tomat­tic [Word­press] han­dles that I thought was re­ally fas­ci­nat­ing. I have no idea, by the way, if this is still the case today. I heard this story prob­a­bly seven or eight years ago, but at the time they had two full-time en­gi­neers who did noth­ing but fix bugs and build sup­port. I heard that one of them was a core en­gi­neer on Word­Press–one of the peo­ple who built it ini­tially.

Our metrics are only maps upon which we build our assumptions and beliefs – the underlying terrain, the real territory of your customers and your business, is far more complex, far more nuanced. Remember that we use metrics because they are abstractions, because they take our complex world that is impossible to understand all at once, and break it into easier-to-understand chunks.

One-on-one meetings with direct reports often feel more hurried and disorganized than they need to be. It’s important to check in regularly with each of your employees, but how can you make the best use of the time? How can you make the meetings more productive and collaborative? What do you need to change as the manager and what do you need to ask your direct report to do differently as well?

I work at a customer support centered company. My official work title is Woo Happiness Engineer. We help customers to make the most of our products, and I am proud of the work I do – making entrepreneurs’ life easier. Unfortunately, customer support seems to have a bad rap in many countries and the idea of choosing support path is relatively new.